


Darkness that Soothes

by elanorjoy



Series: ACOMAF from Rhys' POV-Selected Scenes [3]
Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M, Rhys' POV, Rhysand's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-23 00:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7458780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanorjoy/pseuds/elanorjoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was Cassian knocking me to the ground and beating the living shit out of me for making an offhand comment about a washerwoman when we were twelve.</p><p>This was Azriel the day after he’d learned what Cassian and I had done to his half-brothers more than three hundred years ago, the one of only times I’d seen him completely lose control of his carefully contained emotions.</p><p>This was Mor decimating our family’s cabin in the mountains after Amren had nailed a note over the kitchen sink, unknowingly using the same type of nail that had been used on Mor’s body.</p><p>This was Amren fighting Mor back because she finally, finally had found someone in this foreign realm who actually could fight her and it felt good.</p><p>This was me, fighting and fighting and fighting the both of my brothers at once and then falling to the ground, sobbing like a child two days after my father and I had visited the Spring Court to kill its High Lord and his sons.</p><p>This was Feyre, sobbing as she confronted everything she’d been trying to keep inside all these months. This was Feyre, whose frenzied fists turned into living embers as the last of that toxic rage was finally exhumed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkness that Soothes

Azriel was pissy in a way I hadn’t seen for at least a century. His feelings didn’t manifest themselves as anger, but it tinged every blow he dealt as we sparred. I knew that he had a lot of unresolved emotions regarding his own self-worth, knew that he judged himself harshly based on his skills and how well he felt he was serving his Court, and knew that the fact that Mor was the first one to see him after his failure to infiltrate the mortal queens’ realm was eating away at him. So I let him take all that frustration and annoyance and anger out on me. Especially when my only other option had been watching Cassian train Feyre.

It wasn’t that I was worried about Cassian’s abilities as a teacher. He’d been training my forces for centuries and he was, without question, the best at what he did. It was that Feyre was in Illyrian fighting leathers again and even though it was the third time I’d seen her wearing them, I hadn't gotten used to it. She was fierce in them, a warrior queen. Watching her lithe body as Cassian walked her through the basics of hand-to-hand combat, seeing the seeds of her own deadly power as they were sown . . . It was intoxicating.

So I let Azriel come at me with all his frustration and anger and I went at him with all my own pent-up frustration and within half an hour, we were both sweating so much that we’d stripped out of our shirts. On the other side of the courtyard, Cassian wasn’t holding back as he trained Feyre. I could feel her exhaustion and determination and the occasional moments of delight when she landed a punch through the bond.

Now, she and Cassian were sitting at the edge of the courtyard and Cassian was cracking some stupid line about how out of shape I was. I saw the hint of a smile on Azriel’s face when he heard it. I was considering calling for a break so that we could join them for a drink when Cassian asked.

“So, when are you going to talk about how you wrote a letter to Tamlin, telling him you’ve left for good?”

It was a good thing that Azriel was between me and them. Even still, I considered winnowing over there just so I could smack Cassian across the back of the head for being so blatant. Feyre hadn’t said a word about that letter since our conversation in the foyer yesterday afternoon and I didn’t want to push her. I glared at Az, since he was the only one who knew about the letter, and therefore the only one who could have told Cassian. He just gave me a little shrug and I considered smacking him across the back of the head too.

But, as always, Feyre surprised me. “How about when you talk about how you tease and taunt Mor to hide whatever it is you feel for her?”

It was the last thing either Az or I had been expecting her to say. Azriel tripped, actually tripped over his own foot as he strained to hear how Cassian replied. He noticed me noticing his reaction and recovered quickly, attacking me with more fire and frustration to make up for it, but I knew that Cassian had noticed too.

His laughter carried across the courtyard, only slightly strained and then, loud enough for everyone on the rooftop to hear, “Old news.”

“I have a feeling that’s what she probably says about you.”

Cassian snapped something in reply, but I was too focused on Feyre to pay attention what he’d said. His question circled in her head and I could feel the pangs as she considered the reprecussions down the bond

“Rhys told you?” she finally asked, her voice low.

Again, I shot Azriel a glare. Again, my brother merely shrugged at me. What was done was done and there was nothing he or anybody else could do about it now. Across the courtyard, Cassian was trying to explain himself. Feyre finished her glass of water and pushed past Cassian to get back into the ring, her agitation clear. Azriel noticed too and I sensed him taking stock of the situation, evaluating what he’d do if she got volatile, assessing if Cassian was in any danger, and determining how he'd intervene if it was necessary.

But Cassian wasn’t in any danger. Except of maybe choking on his own foot as he tried to pull it out of his mouth.

“Hey,” he said. Both Az and I were more concentrated on what was happening on the other side of the ring than on our own maneuvers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit a nerve. Az only told me because I told him I needed to know for my own forces; to know what to expect.” That bit was as much for my benefit as it was for Feyre’s. I rolled my eyes at Azriel, a sign that I wasn’t angry at him for telling Cassian and he gave me a small smile back. Across the courtyard, Cas said, “None of us...we don’t think it’s a joke, What you did was a hard call. A really damn hard call. It was just my shitty way of trying to see if you needed to talk about it. I’m sorry.”  
Feyre gave him a long, evaluatory look before finally taking her place in the ring. “All right.”

She wrapped up her hands and Cassian gave her a little smile. It was the kind I’d seen him give soldiers who needed extra encouragement on the battlefield, the kind of the smile that fostered loyalty and love in the men he led into battle. “You didn’t answer my question.”

She didn’t answer him right away and I could feel her mulling the question over, questioning her feelings and her actions and the changes she’d seen in herself over the last week. But to Cassian, she only said, “I’m fine.” and then proceeded to deliver good, clean punches from her left, the side she’d been struggling with all afternoon.

I lost track of what Cassian was saying, parrying against Azriel’s blows automatically without making any moves to the offense. I got lost in the whirlwind of emotions that were coursing through the woman on the other side of the ring. She was attacking the sparring pads with a strength she hadn’t used earlier, but perhaps she hadn’t even been capable of that kind of strength earlier. Her punches were smooth and fast and each strike was perfectly on target. I could see that Cassian was actually working to keep from stepping backwards from the impact. And then her hands started blurring and one of the sparring pads ripped, the tear in the leather audible over the clang of our swords.

Fury, such fury ripped through her. Righteous anger that finally had an outlet as she struck the sparring pads. Her rage gave her strength and soon the thick cotton core of the sparring pads was flying through the air. Still she kept on punching. I felt Azriel relax some of his tension from earlier. This, he had seen before. We all had. This was the pent up emotion, the fear and anger and guilt and sadness that we had all experienced to one degree or another at different points in our lives.

This was Cassian knocking me to the ground and beating the living shit out of me for making an offhand comment about a washerwoman when we were twelve.

This was Azriel the day after he’d learned what Cassian and I had done to his half-brothers more than three hundred years ago, the one of only times I’d seen him completely lose control of his carefully contained emotions.

This was Mor decimating our family’s cabin in the mountains after Amren had nailed a note over the kitchen sink, unknowingly using the same type of nail that had been used on Mor’s body.

  
This was Amren fighting Mor back because she finally, _finally_ had found someone in this foreign realm who actually could fight her and it felt good.

  
This was me, fighting and fighting and fighting the both of my brothers at once and then falling to the ground, sobbing like a child two days after my father and I had visited the Spring Court to kill its High Lord and his sons.

This was Feyre, sobbing as she confronted everything she’d been trying to keep inside all these months. This was Feyre, whose frenzied fists turned into living embers as the last of that toxic rage was finally exhumed.

Azriel and I dropped our swords at the same time as her glowing fist connected with Cassian bare skin.

“I’m all right,” he said, his voice soft. He knew this kind of grief, knew how your body could carry impossibly heavy burdens until suddenly, it just couldn’t bare the weight of them any longer.

She looked up at him through her tears and whispered, “I killed them.”

“I know,” he said. He’d had this conversation before. He’d held me in the mud, covered in blood and sweat and tears as I said it over and over again, crying it into the folds of his tunic. That’s all he’d been able to say back then and it had somehow been enough.

“It should have been me,” she said and looked away as a sob shook her still too-thin shoulders.

Before Cassian could reply, I’d traded places with him. It was a magic I rarely used because it was so disconcerting to the person I was trading places with, but if Cassian minded, he’d have to tell me so later. I was in front of Feyre and she had my sole focus now. Without missing a beat, Cassian had picked up my sword and took my place sparring with Azriel.

I wrapped my wings around her, shielding her from their concerned eyes. I wanted nothing more than to pull her against my chest and hold her as the storm of emotions began to ebb away. But that wasn’t an option. She wasn’t mine to hold like that and I didn’t want to push her like that. So, against every instinct that told me to hold her and kiss away her tears, I slipped my fingers beneath her chin and tipped until she was looking up at me.

Her eyes were the heavy, dark grey of stormclouds over the sea and still shone with the silver of her tears. The scent of her sweat mixed with the scent of her tears filled the cocoon of my wings and the combination was a heady, salty thing that only managed to heightened the spicy floral scent that was so purely Feyre. Crushing guilt poured out of those eyes and it shredded my heart to know that nothing I could possibly say or do could take away that pain. But I could at least let her know that she was not alone.

“You will feel that way every day for the rest of your life,” I finally said. She tried to pull away from me, but I didn’t let her. I waited until those stormcloud eyes met mine again and told her, “And I know this because I have felt that way every day since my mother and sister were slaughtered and I had to bury them myself, and even retribution didn’t fix it.” Tears spilled down her cheeks and I released her chin so that I could wipe them away. “You can either let it wreck you, let it get you killed like it nearly did with the Weaver, or you can learn to live with it.”

Feyre looked up at me and I wondered at what she saw there. Could she see my love for her? Could she feel the mating bond, gentle yet insistent as it pulled us together? Could she tell how grateful I was to the Mother and the Cauldron just to be in her presence at this moment? If she could, she didn’t reveal it.

Finally, after what could have been a millennia or a mere moment, she said. “I’m sorry—about your family.” Her voice was so soft I wouldn’t have been able to hear it if I hadn’t been standing so close.

“I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to spare you from what happened Under the Mountain.” I could barely manage to get the words out around the sudden tightness in my chest. “From dying. From wanting to die.” She started shaking her head, but I kept talking, the words pouring from my lips. A confession for a confession. “I have two kinds of nightmares: the ones where I’m again Amarantha’s whore or my friends are . . .” I closed my eyes against the memory that sprang, unbidden in my head. “And the ones where I hear your neck snap and see the light leave your eyes.”

She didn’t say anything, and there wasn’t anything that she could have said that was better than the knowledge that she was in front of me, alive and, at least, recovering, if not completely well. I felt her gaze on my body like it was her hand trailing along my skin. I tried not to shiver as she took her time examining me.

Once she was through, she lifted one hand between us. I could feel the residual heat on her skin and it took me a moment to register what she was silently asking.

“Ah.” The emotional barrage was over and now she needed normalcy. I pulled back my wings and the weak winter sunlight shone down on us again, lightening her eyes just a bit. “That.”

“Autumn Court, right?”

I took her hand and turned it over in both of mine. She was already starting to show bruises from her sparring. Knowing Cassian, these were just the beginning. There was shockingly little hatred in my voice as I thought about the source of that particular elemental power, especially considering his history with my family. “Right. A gift for its High Lord, Beron.”

I hated Beron and always had. He was old and powerful and brutal and I would never forgive him for raising a son as despicable as Eris. But this was not the time. “I’m not well versed in the complexities of the other High Lords’ elemental gifts,” I said. “But we can figure it out-day by day, if need be.”

“If you’re the most powerful High Lord in history . . .” she began, sounding more and more like her normal self with every word, “does that mean the drop I got from you holds more sway over the others?”

I knew she was thinking about the night she’d been able to get inside my head. The words were there, right there on my lips That’s probably because of the mating bond, but I couldn’t say them outloud. Not here, not like this, not when she was only starting to heal. Surely, that would be too much too soon.

“Give it a try,” I said instead. “See if you can summon darkness. I won’t ask you to try to winnow.”

To her credit, she did not glare at me outright as I teased. “I don’t know how I didn’t it to begin with.”

“Will it into being.” She didn’t even blink as she stared up at me, annoyance written across her face. I shrugged. “Try thinking of me—how good-looking I am. How talented—”

“How arrogant,” she snapped.

“That too.” I crossed my arms.  
“Put a shirt on while you’re at it,” she snipped and I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

“Does it make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m surprised there aren’t more mirrors in this house, since you seem to love looking at yourself so much,” she retorted.

If Azriel hadn’t started choking to hide his laughter and reminded me that they were still on the rooftop with us, I might have kissed her right there. “There’s the Feyre I adore.”

She gave me a scowl, but there was no heat behind it, and dutifully closed her eyes. Almost immediately, all those emotions from before came bubbling back up.

“There are different kinds of darkness,” I tried to explain and she stood there with her eyes screwed shut. “There is the darkness that frightens, the darkness that soothes, the darkness that is restful.” I felt her calming as I spoke the words that my mother had told me hundreds of years earlier. When I’d first started displaying my powers and had been afraid of my ability to summon night, sure that it meant that I was evil. She had held me in her arms and explained the nature of darkness to me. “There is the darkness of lovers, and the darkness of assassins. It becomes what the bearer wishes it to be, needs it to be. It is not wholly bad or good.”

In spite of the calm that had begun to settle over her, I still felt the spikes of her fear through the bond as she looked inside and only found the terrible, terrible darkness. Without thinking, I reached out my own darkness and channeled all my love for her into the tendrils of night that flooded the courtyard.

“Fuck,” Cassian said from somewhere behind us, caught off guard by the sudden loss of light.

“Big Illyrian warlord, afraid of the dark,” Azriel taunted, finally sounding more like himself. Their blades started clanging again.

“Open your eyes,” I told Feyre.

I felt it when she did, when she allowed my darkness to soothe away her own. And then I started to play, teasing out starlight and moonbeams that illuminated the awe on her face. She reached out a hand and let a star play across her fingertips. I was struck, not for the first time that day, with how beautiful she was and I ached with the knowledge of the secret I was keeping from her. I let the darkness fade away.

She blinked in the bright light, squinting up at me like she’d forgotten I was standing there.

“We can work on it later,” I told her. The wind shifted and her scent assaulted me. Cauldron boil me, I was going to die right here on this rooftop. “For now, go take a bath.”

**Author's Note:**

> This scene is actually what prompted me to want to write from Rhysand's POV. It's an incredibly important one to me, not just for Feyre's sake, but as a glimpse at Rhys' Inner Circle. Because I have the feeling that they have all been there. I mean, how could you go through the things that those people have and not break down? And the really, really important part for me is that they were all there for each other during those breakdowns. That Cassian was there to take the blow if Feyre needed it was huge for me and I imagined that it was huge for Rhys too. 
> 
> Plus, there's all that comfort and angst and that's fun to write. ;)


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